b"The combination of a long term rental income plus an initial capital receipt was seen as a strength and a factor that made the product both flexible from a business model perspective and low risk: You get an initial capital receipt, long-term guaranteed rental income, and you dont have to spend that much as a landlord. From a landlord perspective, it works really well. (Interviewee 3)For providers, shared ownership is one way to manage market risk and some providers described changing properties that had been intended for market sale to shared ownership because there was stronger demand:In the long term you get a profit, and a good turnover from people staircasing. If you want mixed tenure, shared ownership works alongside other rental options.And it has the advantage that it de-risks some of the vagaries of the market. (Interviewee 1)It was described as a very flexible product which also makes it low risk to develop, as a property can be sold to households with a range of incomes:To me, it's the king of affordable homeownership, because it's the only product that has total flexibility. By that I mean that you can take one property of 300,000 and because you've got that movable share, it can satisfy so many different income levels. (Interviewee 12)The product is not just an important part of provider business models, but shared ownership has become a significant part of lenders portfolios:Since 2010, our shared ownership book has grown, so its now just less than 27% of our whole mortgage book. And as were about a billion pound organisation in mortgage assets, thats a staggering amount of what we do as a lender. We see shared ownership as a regular tenure, a way for people to buy their homes, and they shouldnt be treated any differently than people buying 100% of their homes. (Interviewee 10)All interviewees described continued strong demand for the product:With shared ownership, there is demand, we know if we build it, someone will buy it.In the market were in at the moment, if youve got enough grant to put into 5"